Posted on 11/16/2003 5:18:29 AM PST by billorites
NOW THAT we’ve learned that Pfc. Jessica Lynch may have been raped by her Iraqi captors, it’s time to put every Presidential candidate on the spot about the subject of women in combat.
Which Presidential candidate will, for the sake of future Jessicas who want to serve their country in the military, promise to reinstate the Pentagon “risk rule” that might have protected her from rape at the hands of the enemy by placing her in a unit farther away from the fighting?
Will Wesley Clark, who has spent his whole career managing military personnel, admit that endangering female troops by stationing them close to combat is a mistake and a threat to overall troop morale?
Will John Kerry, who also witnessed the savagery of war during Vietnam?
Will Howard Dean, who seems to have plenty of opinions on how to prosecute a war, though little experience?
Until 1994, women were not assigned to units close to the front. President Clinton changed that policy by eliminating the “risk rule” in the name of gender equity. Why hasn’t President George W. Bush reversed this 1994 decision, despite the persistence from well-respected groups such as the Center for Military Readiness in Washington?
According to her book, “I’m a Soldier, Too,” and her Veterans Day interview with Diane Sawyer, Jessica Lynch’s doctors told her the lacerations they found were caused by anal penetration in the three hours after the petite blond 19-year-old was captured, a period she says she can’t remember. Her convoy took a wrong turn as it followed a combat unit through the desert. It appears Jessica suffered the same fate as Maj. Rhonda Cornum, a surgeon whose helicopter crashed during the first Gulf War.
So, yes, all you proponents of women in combat, we can count on Saddam’s loyalists to rape our female troops when they’re caught. If we invade Syria and Iran, perhaps our women will be raped some more.
The places where American troops can be predicted to fight in the next decade are not exactly bastions of human rights; they are rogue nations for a reason. These are places that devalue women, scoff at Western morality, and ignore the civilized world’s rules of war. (Christian countries are sometimes no better. Recall the Serbian army’s use of rape as a torture system in the early 1990s.)
These places are the polar opposites of the university campuses and liberal Washington think tanks that hatch naive ideas such as putting women in the line of fire. Are we, as a nation, comfortable sending our mothers and daughters to places where they will almost certainly be raped if captured while serving their country? No. (And if that’s not your answer, it should be.)
Now that Jessica Lynch — who enlisted in the Army as a supply clerk with the belief her 5-foot-3-inch frame would never be put in danger of capture and rape — appears to have been raped, it’s time to fix the problem.
Prior to 1994, a female supply clerk like Jessica probably would not have been so close to danger — in a desert convoy trailing combat forces with toilet paper and meals-ready-to-eat. Before 1994, the Pentagon wisely shielded non-combat servicewomen from support positions close to the action where they faced a “substantial risk of capture.”
Just as every Marine is a rifleman, no matter what his military occupational specialty, every soldier near the front is in danger of capture, torture and death. But women face an additional danger in rape that men do not and throughout the history of war have not.
It’s one thing for a woman to request a combat situation, as female military aviators do. It’s quite another for a woman who enlists, believing she is freeing a man to fight, to be forcibly assigned a combat support position near the front, as Jessica was.
According to a 1998 Government Accouting Office survey, only 10 percent of female privates and corporals favored the military’s policy of involuntary assignment of women to near-combat positions. The government has since stopped asking this question on its surveys, the Center for Military Readiness points out.
If you don’t want your daughter or sister to suffer the same fate Jessica Lynch may have, confront the candidates when they are campaigning in New Hampshire and cannot squirm out of answering. And sign a petition at www.americansforthemilitary.com, asking President Bush to reinstate the “risk rule” before our nation’s hearts are broken again by another rape of a servicewoman.
In addition, given that they have accepted the responsibility, they should immediately be subject to the draft, but they are not, which is universal discrimination against American men.
If the President were to sign an order such that women who fear being raped, may opt out of the combat zone, then so should men be able to opt out for fear of such torture.
In plain language, the ladies are either in it up to their tits, or they are out of it and out of the way.
Already, we face the probability that some "modern country" will field predominantly "gay" army battalions who will likely rape "same sex" --- not to mention that a "gay" unit has not to date been necessary, in some areas of the planet.
If we are to have a home and a place of comfort to return to, which is one of the major places in our lives for which we are fighting to secure --- and I happen to think that a worthy part of that are the women in a man's life --- then some honesty about a man's role in life, as a protector, will have to be embraced again by American women, instead of being degraded because women want what they want when they want it ... to the point of killing their babies in the millions.
Inspite of considerable wisdom and evidence of how wrong that is, to the contrary of what women want.
The last three decades of "what women want" has got women where?
It has made them slaves to the political fascism of liberals' lust for power over them.
Rape, and women have voted for it.
While I do have cultural reasons for not wanting women in combat.....I would not deny any person (male or female) the Right to protect their family in any way they saw fit...including serving in a Combat Unit.
redrock
p.s....protecting women from rape as an excuse why they cannot be in combat is a false argument. Men have been raped in combat too...and yet, they still serve.
He will not. He is nothing by a Clinton stooge.
Thank you for pointing that out, Redrock.
Of course rape is an emotional issue, for male and female victims. It's too bad that men are so reluctant to speak about it because we could all help one another to heal from that assault.
I first became aware of this issue when learning about the Holocaust. The female survivors would speak, albeit reluctantly, about what had happened to them while the men would not, even though it obviously had happened to them as well. IMO, no one should have to carry that burden alone.
redrock
Actually they haven't. (1)According to the last survey, 90% of the lower enlisted women did not think that women should be in combat. Simply put they don't want to go to war. (2) The risk rule was removed by a stroke of Clinton's pen. He did it to avoid having a national debate in congress (and the media) on this issue.
Jessica enlisted in a non-combat job. No one enlisting for supply job thinks that they will face an enemy in combat. And you think that young women who enlist today, to know and accept the threat of rape? How do they know about it? Do you think the national media is going to report that Jessica was raped. They (the national media) denied that any rapes took place during the last war. It was only afterwards that the truth came out.
And even if every woman in America did choose the risk of rape, So What?
The issue is primarily what is best for the Armed Forces. We have rules against women in combat, and fraternization because concern for the females safety has a harmful effect on moral and combat effectiveness. Clinton's action removed one of these rules to please radical feminazi.
No One has a right to serve in the Military. No one, not even females have a right to serve in a combat unit.
The reason why rape of female soldiers is such a big deal is that women in combat have a negative effect on the moral and combat effectiveness of the male soldiers.
The Israeli Army tried women in combat because they were desperate, it did not work. Women in combat units are a sign of weakness. Something that nations due as a last resort.
...and IF a person (male OR female) wishes to serve in Combat Arms (and can handle carrying around all the equipment and arms)...I have no problem with it.
...and I would have NO problem being in combat with women soldiers.
redrock
So, you are telling me that on average you would rather be in a firefight with a 5'3" nice girl from W. Va. beside you than a 190 lb young male chock full of testosterone? Give me a break for taking this moment to laugh out loud. Jennifer Lynch even admitted she was cowering, whether her weapon was jammed or not. I guarantee there were men who died in Iraq because they were covering the behinds of women.
Soldiers are fighting machines. If you wouldn't give a soldier a BB gun for a rifle, why would you give him a woman to be his foxhole companion (except for the obvious reason).
I've read enough of these threads to come to the conclusion that there are a number of FReepers who are completely out of touch with reality. Only in a country as prosperous and soft as ours, would someone even attempt to make the claim that women can be as effective in men in combat.
The idea is preposterous.
They sure have!
Witness the 69% of the votes rapist X42 received in 1996 being from women.
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